The Environment Report

SYDNEY – Climate activists from around the world will launch a hunger strike here on Friday, describing their protest as a "moral reaction to an immoral situation" in the face of environmental catastrophe.

Strike leader Paul Connor and seven other people in Australia, the United States and Europe intend to refuse all food until the end of a meeting of world governments on climate change in Copenhagen, which runs from December 7 to 18.

"It's a global emergency," Connor told Agence France-Presse.

"We believe that making a moral, principled stand for what's right, what's just, can have a huge impact."

The hunger strikers want world leaders at the Copenhagen meeting to commit to stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere at 350 parts per million (ppm).

In its benchmark 2007 report, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the key for preventing dangerous global warming was to keep CO2 concentrations below 450 ppm.

More than 70 other activists will join the core group in beginning a fast on Friday, although they intend to go on the hunger strike for shorter amounts of time.

The fast will begin in Australia at 11:00 p.m. (1200 GMT), kicking off similar action in the United States, Britain, India, France, Germany, Canada, South Africa, Belgium, Honduras, Bhutan, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

Connor, a 29-year-old psychology and philosophy student, said he would hold his hunger strike protest outside Parliament House in Canberra unless it was not physically possible.

"We may get to the point where we just can't move around," said Connor, who founded the Climate Justice Fast group that is organizing the strike.